Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape (until Oct 16) Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA
I am sorry to say that the Hopper exhibition did not spark joy. I found myself interested, but never felt the thrill so many other artists provide. For example, I was dazzled by Gio Swaby at the Peabody Essex and awed to view Hakim Raquib’s photos at the AAMARP (African American Master Artists in Residency Program). But this Hopper collection of both watercolors and oils, focusing on buildings and scenes in Gloucester, was dulled for me by the parallel mentions and pieces of Josephine N. Hopper (nee Nivison).
She was a rising watercolor star and after she hooked up with Hopper, she convinced curators to include him in shows, leading to his first sale in a decade. Once married, she abandoned her own name – a move that is incomprehensible to me for a professional woman – and began to concentrate on motivating Hopper, promoting his work, and becoming wifey. Her own output slowed to a crawl as he became increasingly prominent. He treated her with disrespect, but she took care of him and his legacy until and after his death in 1967.
The paintings and drawings at this exhibit lack the inclusion of many human figures – lack the loneliness and stillness we see in his later, more famous work. There are single houses, boats, and streets. The early work is a bit bland, but we can see him grow as time goes on.
Finally, hats off to the small Cape Ann Museum which has been overwhelmed by the massive demand to see this show. Our many small Massachusetts museums are treasures which we should support. Yesterday, though, was uncomfortably crowded, despite timed entry tickets, and the explanatory plaques were done in a small grey-ish font under lighting that was too dim. As a result, no matter what angle I could squeeze myself into among the others, it was very hard to read them.
I woke up shortly after 5:00am and stumbled to my computer, turning on the TV for the news, as is my wont. And kazam, it’s the Queen’s funeral. I’m afraid I got completely captured and continued to keep it in the background for six hours as I did my morning ablutions and various tasks. I ended up writing a blog about fascinators, of which there were a plethora among the dignitaries in the churches, and other memories from my decade in England.
However, I cannot for one second allow anyone to mistake me for a Monarchist. To the contrary. The splendor of this imposing day sparkled with jewels and gold ravished from colonized countries. Clearly no cost was spared in marking the moment, despite the disintegration of Britain’s economy and especially of its health system. It was truly a Royal affair, that is, a let-them-eat-cake moment, full of quite excessive pomp to shore up a family who INHERIT their roles and their lands and their bank accounts. Some say princes; some say parasites.
This long day was soaked in two British colonial bulwarks: Christianity and military. These have been among the main tools in imperial British rampages and they were on proud display today. And who does military drag better than them? Feathers and gold braiding and dazzling regimental colors and drums and more drums. The choreography was mind-boggling – not a mis-step among the participants despite it being such an excruciatingly complex set of endeavors.
The guys whose specialized task was to carry the coffin around, put it in/out of the hearse, in/out of churches, up/down steps, no less, had their steps impressively coordinated, like a refined martial arts kata or a well-rehearsed line dance. And then the coffin was towed by ropes by 142 members of the Royal Navy in fancy outfits through the streets of central London as it sat on a gun carriage.
And yes, I appear to hold a minority view. So many hundreds of thousands of people lining the streets and the miles-long driveways to the castles, for a glimpse of a coffin on which sits a crown that embodies everything stinky about colonizers. And many people spent the night on the street to hold their places, and no one minded at all.
Things that stood out to me: 1) While the crowd had all the feels, none of the participants – from the King down to the drummers – showed even a drizzle of emotion – no tears, no sobs, no celebration, no amusing anecdotes. For myself, if I might paraphrase the anarchist Emma Goldman, If you can’t dance at the funeral, it must not be mine. 2) I did not see a single person in a wheelchair, not among the thousands with a role in the day or the throngs along the way. 3) The new Prime Minister fit right in with her dry monotone. 4) If it had rained, nothing would have been different. 5) I thought curtseying was no longer in vogue, that neck bowing like the boys was the done thing. Apparently everyone is watching too much historical costume drama.
My favorite part was when they circled the Queen Victoria monument at the end of London’s Mall (not the retail kind). It reminded me of the time we had the first London Lesbian Avengers demo there in September, 1994. You’ll find me right under the E in Lesbian.
As I watch the Queen’s funeral in the background and the women in their particular head-gear, I am reminded of my neighbor in the Holloway neighborhood of London. I was quite new in town and needed to escape a nasty living situation. I was offered a sublet in a converted church on Chillingworth Street. The former church had been painted black in contrast to its white columns, and two stories of flats were built on its top. The main church area was divided into artist studios. My apartment was two rooms on two stories – one up and one down. I lived there alone, except for large chunks of one year when I shared it with my chosen niece Oona who came over as she turned 21 from Vermont.
Down the hall was a brilliant Black gay milliner who designed fascinators and hats, one-of-a-kind confections that were worn by women at formal events, most famously the Royal Ascot, a British racecourse which has high-falutin’ events. My neighbor was a freelancer, struggling for customers, and all the time turning out magnificent hats to order. For a visual of this genre, I have featured some examples of such items that Meghan Markel has worn since her marriage, as she frames them so well.
Before I found this apartment, I had lived on my arrival to London for several months in a moldy, smelly bedsit – that is, a poor person’s version of a studio apartment, a bed, a dresser, and a hot plate. The bathroom was down the hall. It was in the Hackney home of a “friend” and her dreadful partner, a coarse man who persisted in opening the bathroom door whenever I was sitting on the toilet. Not once, not twice, but repeatedly. They refused to put a lock on the door, her the pathetic enabler and him the sleaze-ball.
So when someone introduced me to the Canadian woman who wanted to sublet her flat in the Holloway converted church while she returned to Canada, I was hugely relieved. I lived there for a couple of years until my milliner neighbor, who had become my friend, warned me that an inspection was coming. Inspection? Yes, all this time I had been staying in a Housing Association apartment, low-income housing that my “landlady” had managed to qualify for despite her actually being a professional of some wealth. Of course I have seen parasites who have the resources to get themselves benefits intended for people without resources. Governmental institutions often make the process of obtaining these benefits so laborious and convoluted that it is the folks who hire lawyers and experts who score them. Ask any American who has applied for disability benefits.
And to top it all off, my “landlady” was charging me market rent, about twice what she herself was paying to the Housing Association, not only ripping them off, but ripping me off in the process. And now, back to the ornate, dour, and regimented spectacle of the Queen’s funeral, as the procession heads from London to Windsor Castle, where I was once, by the way, a keynote speaker at a European Union conference on volunteerism.
Loved it. Olga’s absent revolutionary mother looms over her life and that of her brother Prieto. Born and raised in New York, they have disappointed their mother, an underground Puerto Rican independence activist, by becoming successful. Olga is a wedding planner and Prieto is a politician who is blackmailed by greedy criminals. There’s a gay theme, a struggle against gentrification, deep family secrets, a dollop of organized crime, and plenty of romance. Gonzalez’s debut novel is a page turner that has strong content packaged in a swift and engaging read.
“Law & Order” is often my white noise when I’m doing the dishes or eating a meal. Apparently the re-runs assume an audience of my age peers, because the ads are usually for memory boosters or arthritis dampers.
Today a commercial break begins with a grimacing man naked under his robe, his foot up on the bathroom sink, and his arm reaching back into his crotch. Suddenly, a woman’s voice and person pops up saying, “Guys, we need to talk about your hairy balls.” This very phenomenon ("trimming balls") is news to me, although I admit my balls expertise is limited. The word, repeated multiple times, is jarring to hear on TV. But who is demanding bald balls?
Got one minute to learn about ball shaving?
As if that weren’t sufficiently surreal, another crotch-focused ad followed immediately. This one for pussy deodorant. Companies have been trying for decades to turn women’s crotches into swampy, smelly cesspools, and according to a completely random survey of my besties, they have never succeeded. But if they can afford an ad on “Law & Order,” they must be moving a lot of this misogynist product.
Wanna see their nasty-assed ad?
The anti-sex, body-shaming message of both these ads is that however you exist naturally, it simply ain’t good enough. More than that, your body is disgusting. Trim this, stifle that – otherwise your life will suck.
In fact, I find these ads so offensive that I’m hoping to once again hear about cancer meds, the meaning of “a1c” levels, and life insurance for $9.99 a month.
PS: A friend thought these must be Saturday Night Live skits. But no, I did really really see these ads during an afternoon “Law & Order.”
I was disappointed to realize that Leonard Cohen isn’t the star of this film.
His song Hallelujah is the subject. We hear from a long string of musicians who more or less made their careers covering this song. We learn little new about Cohen himself, a conflicted, complicated artist. Instead, it’s all about the song’s journey as so many others reconfigured Hallelujah to suit their own needs. The ending was quite moving, when Cohen returns, broke, to the stage. And we get to hear KD Lang’s brilliant rendition of Hallelujah.
I'm staying on a lake in mid-Maine with sweet friends. It is another world for me – but a staple of New England culture. I am a stranger in a strange land, but I put aside the irony of celebrating “independence day” in a country built on the theft by white men of everyone else’s independence. As white men shoot up the world, steal our bodies and our wealth, and face little effective opposition to their increasing fascistic success, I am learning of a part of American culture that is rather new to me.
Yesterday morning we were part of a festive July 4th parade of residents' boats - pontoons (especially ours full of varied queers waving rainbow flags, wearing sequins, and blaring Whitney Houston), row boats full of kids being pulled by parents on a jet ski, speed boats, a big boat captained by a loud Santa Claus, and two dozen more lake-worthy vehicles.
In the afternoon, we were invited to a BBQ with our pontoon posse, at their “camp.” A camp is a lakeside cottage suitable for summer holidays. Many of these were built by grandparents or great-grandparents, originally without electricity or plumbing. Usually they were located fairly close to the family home. Subsequent generations added power, dug a well, or built on a bathroom. Many are remodeled with great charm, while only a few have been sold to people who turned them into McMansions. These camps are not connected to a water or sewage grid, so the water in the sink and shower is directly from the lake and people who don’t have a well, bring in their drinking water.
Between one’s camp and the water, everyone has a dock with a boat or three, a deck with lots of chairs, and a fire pit. The homes have a sun porch with screens and maybe windows, often just yards from the water. My friends also have a hammock and a little motorboat from the 50s that is a wonderful ride, as long as the wind isn’t churning up the lake. Late spring and dusk and nighttime are plagued with mosquitoes, but that’s what the sun porches are for – escaping these ravenous creatures.
With the addition of Wifi around the lake, families were reunited during Covid, as it was the perfect spot to build a small, safe community, and live a life – at least during the warm half of year. Most camps have no heat beyond a wood stove and the unpaved road is not plowed. But when the camps were opened, adult children returned and life went on.
On the evening of July 4th, individuals around the lake set off fireworks, which Maine has apparently legalized after a history of neighboring New Hampshire dominating the market. It was hard to stay awake for the sky to darken, after such an eventful day, but soon impressive fireworks began in three different private spots around the lake. I insisted we go outside to the water to watch them, but after a couple of snapshots I faced the reality that the mosquitos owned the nighttime outdoors, reducing me to the status of their dinner. I retreated with the hope that I am more easily persuaded to surrender to mosquitos than I am to fascists.
Oops, I completely forgot to blog about my inclusion in a stunningly talented line-up for the Queer Cabarets, produced by Peter DiMuro. What a great way to celebrate Pride and of course everyone is welcome.
This will be a fabulous Queer Cabaret - singing, dancing, drag queens, comedians - and me (!). I perform on Friday June 17 and Saturday June 18 (6:00 and again 8:30 both nights). It's not too late for you to get tickets for the Central Square Theater.
The shows will feature area and national LGBTQ+ community members, ages 20’s to 70’s and from all points on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. Expect wonderful performances - can we say high-heeled pole-dancing meets Cole Porter? - along with the funny and often poignant reflections on gay to queer lives over the span of 100 years.
Yesterday I went to a matinee in a movie house for the first time in well over two years. Luckily, there were only three other people inside the theatre, which required masking. I went to see Pedro Almodóvar’s riveting “Parallel Mothers” starring the radiant Penélope Cruz.
As always, Almodóvar shows a deep understanding of women’s lives and loves. Janis (Cruz) and teenager Ana (Milena Smit) meet across generations and across the room in a maternity hospital. Their labor and birthings happen at the same time and the bond they mold is both enduring and multi-faceted.
Israel Elejalde, as Arturo, is satisfyingly handsome and sincere as Janis’ lover, and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, as Ana’s mother Teresa, rings true as a conflicted parent who wants only to explore her acting career.
I have long been a fan of Almodóvar – whose queer sensibility is underpinned by more than a dollop of intelligence and a bountiful serving of empathy. His films are never boring.
This film’s framework is the search for truth about the Franco rule of fascism. Spain is a country which is fast forgetting its own history – so recent that I myself remember visiting Spain during the Franco regime. Franco only died in 1975, but already the younger generations are being deprived of their own past by a national denial.
Sorrows, secrets, sexualities, and passion mark “Parallel Mothers” – as they do all Almodóvar films. What better way to break yet another Covid barrier – in-person film viewing – than to see the work of this beloved director.
The year I was born, 1947, Rachel Carson wrote a 23-page piece for the USA Department of Interior titled Parker River: A National Wildlife Refuge. You can access it here.
The first line reads: “The Parker River Wildlife Refuge is New England’s most important contribution to the national effort to save the water fowl of North America.” During my recent visit to the Refuge, nature proved Carson’s point. And as we drove down the main route, a flock of huge black birds suddenly occupied the leafless branches of the trees around us. A birder passing by identified them for us as crows. Crows apparently are not shy and were happy to be photographed. Later we saw blue birds and red birds and other migrating birds on their wise way to warmer climates.
The Refuge makes up much of Plum Island, which is 11 miles (4,662 acres) of barrier island north of Massachusetts’ Cape Ann. Conservation became a priority in 1679 when settlers’ livestock were stopped from ranging free on the island, eating up all the vegetation. The first house was built in 1752, but a bridge over the estuary separating it from the mainland was established in the early 1800s, mainly to service the new hotel. There is no longer a hotel on Plum Island, but the level of construction is slightly insane.
It used to be a neighborhood of beach cottages and as the years passed people added a room or a second floor or a big porch. Today, there is an alarming proliferation of McMansions, the more recent ones built on stilts, most of them massive and ugly, some of them four stories high. But the kicker is that many are built on the edge of the marsh, cutting off the view of the traditional cottages, throwing unwelcome shadows over multiple houses.
However, Parker River Refuge is the Island’s jewel and, in my opinion, should be considered one of the wonders of the world. Its undulating dunes, dramatic beaches, four rivers, bog, swamps, and the magnificent Great Marsh sit under a Big Sky. I first encountered a Big Sky when I was in Kenya in about 1996. Of all visual and physical experiences I have had while traveling, the Big Sky over Kenya’s Masai Mara ranks as my most euphoric. Likewise, here at the Refuge, the great expanse of over 3,000 acres of salt marsh with its waving grasses, crisscrossed with tidal pools, met the changing sky in an exhilarating view. I realized with a start that I was downright happy. I was breathless with a visceral joy that contrasted with my feelings these last years in which I’ve been living in basically one room watching the world suffer.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has done a sublime job in making this huge Marsh and the acres of dunes accessible. They have built many handsome boardwalks, the majority with explicit accessibility, but all with smooth faux-wooden paths elevated above the marsh and the dunes. Some of the boardwalks climbed over the dunes and descended to the sea. Some wound through the high grasslands, with creeks underneath turning into puddles, and black water nourishing reeds. All of these boardwalks are beautifully done and took me to places I would never otherwise consider climbing up or scrabbling over. Even the observation tower was only three flights of steps and I was easily able to mount it.
The rolling dunes were decorated with thickets of beach plum (thus Plum Island!) and grasses. Between the dunes are black pines and eastern red cedar trees, which reminded me of eucalyptus trees with their shedding bark. The brilliance of the walkways is that they allow visitors to be closer and deeper in the dunes and marsh than one anticipates, without any damage to the environment.
On the other hand, the Joppa Flats Education Center and Wildlife Sanctuary, apparently operated by the Massachusetts Audubon Society, offered an unpaved road and heaps of garbage at its entrance. We turned around and went back into the Refuge instead of visiting it.
Another absolute treat was staying at the comfortable, luxurious Airbnb which the owner titled “My Dream house with views of the marsh and sunset.” I am a literal person and that is also literally my dream view. The apartment did not disappoint. It was a bit too cold to use the marsh-facing porch, but when sitting in the living room chairs, I looked straight out the sliding glass doors to the marsh and its sunsets. These are so stunning that car after car of locals pulled up to watch the sunset before going on their way.
A late November trip was just what the doctor ordered. There were few folks around. Even more important, we avoided the infamous summer greenhead flies. We didn’t have to deal with ticks, mosquitos, or poison ivy, all of which flourish in the summer. Plum Island is known as a gorgeous beach destination and becomes heavily congested, I was told. I’m not a big beach lass, but now I can’t live without the Great Marsh. So let the others stretch out on the exquisite plum sand. I’ll be visiting when I have these wonderlands more or less to myself.
Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns, and her husband David McMahon, were not the right people to make the lengthy documentary on Muhammed Ali for PBS. I felt the long series had a subtly hostile tone to Ali and a more explicit hostility to boxing. Despite having the resources to access piles of stunning archival footage and despite having a massive eight hours of airtime, the entire work was devoid of emotion. Muhammed Ali was a passionate, emotional figure, but this was not reflected in the deadpan commentary, not the least by the guy they presented as the biographer of Ali, who seemed barely conscious.
This is not to minimize the insights of the brilliant writer and Ali fan Walter Moseley, the inside view of Ali’s brother Rahman, and the expert blow-by-blow from former boxer (and now actor) Michael Bentt. In fact, if it weren’t for Bentt, the series would have been stumbling around the ring helplessly.
If you have been a fan of Ali, as I have been most of my life, then there isn’t much new in this chronological series – other than wonderful clips and images. I appreciated that Burns allowed the women in Ali’s life to talk about his obsessive cheating and need for conquest after conquest, while they provided a home, a haven, and a family. But I was irritated that Burns acted like he had single-handedly discovered that people get hurt boxing and that Ali could be mean during a fight. Burns brought no real insight into Ali’s relationship to Elijah Muhammed and the Nation of Islam. We see his involvement, we see his betrayal of Malcolm X (which he regretted his whole life), and we see that his connection with the group’s leader was a bit of a roller coaster. But Burns provided no depth, no clarity, no understanding of Ali’s experience of Islam. And then there was the way Burns twisted Ali’s unique charisma into some sort of manipulation, when in fact Muhammed Ali widely inspired love. I adored him myself.
The most profound deficit was a total lack of appreciation of boxing throughout the series. We were shown the worst moments of every fight, the blood, the broken noses, the pain. Thankfully, we were also shown some of the spectacular conditioning and training the pros went through. But the filmmakers seemed to have only the most rudimentary grasp of the degree to which Ali brought rhythm, motion, and dancing to the fight. No one ever moved in the ring the way he did. Before Ali, no one ever imagined the sweet beauty a fighter could bring to such a brutal sport. Before Ali, no other boxer floated like a butterfly.
I grew up following Ali, starting with his 1960 Olympic win when I was 13 and was just becoming aware of the civil rights movement. He was only 18 and won all four of his fights in Rome. Over the years, I kept my eye on him, as if we were growing up together. His later struggle against the war in VietNam meant everything to those of us fighting the cops in the streets to protest that vile war. His ability to connect oppressions – “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me n****r.” – was an education for us, as was his example of civil resistance to the draft. And all the time he was the most fluid, graceful fighter we had ever seen.
My exposure to the fight game began early. My parents were big on sports, almost any sport that involved our hometown Pittsburgh. Once we got a black and white TV, we would eat dinner sitting around a card table watching Studio Wrestling on Saturday nights. It originated out of Pittsburgh, and we were as familiar with Killer Kowalski and his main antagonist local boy Bruno Sammartino as we were with our relatives. My dad knew Referee Izzy Moidel, a local ex-boxer. Each of the wrestlers had a schtick and a script – it was fake fighting. Obviously. But I got a taste for the give and take of the fight from those weekly broadcasts. (And went on to become a Tae Kwon Do master for my first career, but that’s another story.)
When Muhammed Ali turned up, he had his schtick too, but he was for real. Boxing was for real. Ali gave shape and meaning to one-on-one combat, not only by being brilliant in the ring, but also by being brilliant out of it. He harnessed his charisma and his pronouncements to his beliefs and became one of the most influential athletes in history.
The Burns group seemed to think that Ali was “interesting,” a celebrity, entertaining. But I didn’t feel the love. Of course, they pointed out his athletic and political contributions, but I was left wondering if they had any feel for the depth of his influence. They stayed, it felt, on an unexcited, slightly aloof level of exposition, more interested in the count than the fervor: one, two, three – Ali won the heavyweight championship three different times.
There’s been a lot of discussion about why Burns (white/male/straight) has the total indulgence of PBS, which for 40 years has broadcast some 200 hours of his work! Meanwhile, there are generations of filmmakers who can’t get their toe in the door, not the least directors of color and women. A long-term Boston PBS tv host, the racist, reactionary Emily Rooney (yes, the daughter of –nepotism is becoming a theme in this piece), retired from her show after her disgusting dismissal of the very idea that a filmmaker of color could reach the heights of Burns. Over 300 film and TV professionals wrote a complaint letter to PBS asking “How many other ‘independent’ filmmakers have a decades-long exclusive relationship with a publicly-funded entity? Your commitment to diversity at PBS is not borne out by the evidence.” The privileged position of the Burns group impacts everything about their work – and in the case of Muhammed Ali, makes them the wrong group of people for the job.
Want to get an intimate sense of Muhammed Ali? Do yourself a huge favor and watch Billy Crystal’s hilarious, moving 14-minute tribute at Ali’s funeral. I’ve seen it a dozen times and have never failed to tear up. Eight hours of Burns’ presentation and I never felt much other than annoyance.
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